It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.
But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.
Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.
The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.
I mean, the two weeks of darkness is the real killer.
I mean look, let’s say our datacenter requires 100 kw of power. That means about an 800 square m solar array. If you need to store enough power to run the system through a two week night, you’ll need a lot of batteries and a much larger array. You’ll only be collecting power half the time, so the array needs to be twice as large. But there are about 30% losses in transferring energy to the battery, drain over time, and then transferring back, so some quick math says you now need somewhere around 230kw, for a 1800 square m solar array.
Currently, an array large enough to generate 100kw weighs between 1-2 tons. If we’re optimistic and say 1 ton, that’s 2.25 tons for our equivalent moon array
Now the batteries. The capacity needs to be enough to store 130kw over the course of two weeks. 130kw x 24hours x 14days = 43,680 kw hours of storage. Lithium ion batteries weigh about 5kg per kwh of storage. 43,680 kwh of storage would weigh 218 tons. And that’s just the base weight of the batteries, I didn’t factor in whatever structures or systems the batteries would need to be usable in space.
Here’s where I point out that it costs about $5 mil per ton sent to orbit. It costs somewhere between $100 mil and $1 bil to send 1 ton to the moon. Personally, I think it’s a lot easier to send 1 ton to low earth orbit, than to send 220 tons all the way to the moon. I think the only way to make data centers on the moon make sense, would be if you’re already living and working on the moon in a functioning settlement.
As crazy as orbital data centers are, if your counting in dollars, lunar data centers are literally 10,000 times crazier.
It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.
But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.
Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.
The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.
I’m not sure the moon makes a lot of sense.
I mean, the two weeks of darkness is the real killer.
I mean look, let’s say our datacenter requires 100 kw of power. That means about an 800 square m solar array. If you need to store enough power to run the system through a two week night, you’ll need a lot of batteries and a much larger array. You’ll only be collecting power half the time, so the array needs to be twice as large. But there are about 30% losses in transferring energy to the battery, drain over time, and then transferring back, so some quick math says you now need somewhere around 230kw, for a 1800 square m solar array.
Currently, an array large enough to generate 100kw weighs between 1-2 tons. If we’re optimistic and say 1 ton, that’s 2.25 tons for our equivalent moon array
Now the batteries. The capacity needs to be enough to store 130kw over the course of two weeks. 130kw x 24hours x 14days = 43,680 kw hours of storage. Lithium ion batteries weigh about 5kg per kwh of storage. 43,680 kwh of storage would weigh 218 tons. And that’s just the base weight of the batteries, I didn’t factor in whatever structures or systems the batteries would need to be usable in space.
Here’s where I point out that it costs about $5 mil per ton sent to orbit. It costs somewhere between $100 mil and $1 bil to send 1 ton to the moon. Personally, I think it’s a lot easier to send 1 ton to low earth orbit, than to send 220 tons all the way to the moon. I think the only way to make data centers on the moon make sense, would be if you’re already living and working on the moon in a functioning settlement.
As crazy as orbital data centers are, if your counting in dollars, lunar data centers are literally 10,000 times crazier.